Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Strand

It reads like a provocation, but it’s really a boundary marker: Strand is carving out a space where the poem isn’t obliged to behave. “Truth” here isn’t the fact-checkable kind; it’s the pressure for art to deliver a moral, an argument, a confession that can be translated into plain speech. By disavowing it, Strand isn’t endorsing lies so much as refusing the poem’s conscription into reportage. He’s protecting ambiguity as a legitimate end state, not a failure to communicate.

The second clause sharpens the stance. “Conventional notions of what is beautiful” points at the inherited machinery of taste: harmony, uplift, polish, the kind of aesthetic consensus that turns art into a status signal. Strand’s work often lives in a cooler register - dream logic, estrangement, the quiet dread of being a self in a vast blank world. The beauty he’s after is frequently sideways: the elegance of a precise unease, the clean line that makes an emptiness feel architectural.

Subtext: this is an argument for autonomy, but also for risk. If you’re not chasing truth or approved beauty, you can follow the poem’s own internal necessity - image, cadence, odd turns of thought - wherever it goes. Contextually, Strand comes of age amid late-modern and postwar skepticism about grand narratives and stable meaning; the lyric “I” becomes less a reliable witness than a moving shadow. The statement flatters no audience. It dares the reader to stop asking what a poem proves and start noticing what it conjures.